Meditative Reconaissance

Explicitly political art is hard. You know, all that doxa. I've only ever been able to like the work of two or three really clearly political artists. The first, a Filipino-American artist whose name I can't remember (Bloody catholic bloody blood and crazed madness) and then Mark Lombardi. I loved __________ art for it's extremity. Unlike, say, I don't know, Andres Serrano, there wasn't any distance, but ___________ had a real sense of line, and drips, and had a bit of comic book profanity in there. I wish I could remember his name. Lombardi, on the other hand, is all irony and coolness, and his diagrams are so balanced, so sane and classical, that they mimicked conspiratorial logic, with its aura of inevitability, while all the time being cool, so cool, about subjects that nobody who's not in a suit is cool with, except investigative journalists. Poltical art's got to be done now, though - Brecht said something about there being certain times when it was impossible to write about trees...something like that. Oh god, then there's Peter Saul...oh gawd - is that political art? Or does it just hate you and me?

Trevor Paglen, whose show, "The Other Night Sky" is currently on display at the Berkeley Art Museum, describes the problem pretty succintly in a discussion of Lombardi:

"...(Lombardi's) work depicts networks of relationships. Visually, they appear to be homogenous or 'neutral.' The actual content of relationships he depicts remains obscure (or reduced to financial exchange.) If one imagines Lombardi's work as a didactic tool, I'm not sure that it's very helpful. I would argue that the work is politically misleading because his maps suggest some kind of order to the relationships he depicts when there are actually deep internal contradictions, not to mention much more going on 'outside the frame.'

...on the other hand, I think that Lombardi's work succeeds as 'art' precisely for the reasons it fails as didactic work. I very much like the work when I view it in a more fantastical (as opposed to didactic) way."

It seems to me that Paglen is trying to deal with the "fantastic-gap" in political art. His work consists of flatly paranoid photos of spy satellites flying through constellations The BAM exhibit has about 10 large c-print photos, and a hypnotic installation of a large spinning globe with projections of spy satellites in near earth orbit blinking all across its surface.

These photos are the nighttime version of Richard Misrach's parched desert light. Where Misrach's work is all about the effects of the secrets at night. Paglen's is about the unseen causes - rather than finding Lombardi's elegant curves and diagrams, he find straight lines, made by the secret satellites, looking and looking, as they pass through constellations, made of imagined lines depicting scenes from mythology, made permament through parallax and memory.

Why am I writing about this on the MM blog? I think this work is related to Mrs. Maybe in its effects, if not in its subjects. It stretches back to the oldest of activities - looking at all the little night lights looking down on us, making meaning out of the occluded. Instead of privileging the meaning-making of looking, this work takes part more in an occult 'putting together of pieces.' We have stars, and constellations; what we're looking for and at isn't the hint of an eternally vigilant god or lifeforce, but of government agencies and tech tech tech tech.

Endarkenment, then, is not only a function of the opposite of Enlightenment, it is also the mask under which the madness of daylight America grimaces, glares, and peers.

So, back to the sublime. Sublime surveillance, meditative reconaissance, the unknowable firmament, like everything else in the anthropocene, is full of your face and mine.

-Jared

OMIGOD! Look at RD's hair. You can't beat that with a bat!

Ange Mlinko on probably my favorite poetry correspondence, EVER. Duncan & Levertov. They were real nasty to each other, but these letters are so tender, and so committed. Read 'em.

-Jared

Slow Poetry & Black Swans

Slow Poetry

and Responses To the potentially corrupt and bourgie-ness of the idea.

Also, the shit continues at Dale's blog, which is linked over there >

Ok, I'm all for the "How to Live, What to Do-ness of this lil idea. SI and I were talking about Black Swans, uncertainty and unpredicability, and somehow this morphed into a discussion of our sense of the pained selfconsciousness of the sort of "poetry community" thing, and where we fit into that thing. L and I have also talked about "experimental" poetry basically just equals good poetry. So, anyway, this slowness is something I like, but I'm aware of the problems - I don't feel like it's neccessary to blog about it too much, but I often return to Bhanu K's question about my Merced poems: "If chaos is sleepy, what wakes it up?" - Mercediana is a place that needs its non-blog-egghead slowness, and doesn't need anymore chaos, poor city.

Don't need no Jesus and Mary Chain.

This also has something to do with an idea I've been talking to Steve Kramp about, "Slow Sports." He kept asking me what was happening in the NBA championships, and I didn't know - B-Ball being too fast for me - I spoke of "Slow Sports," mostly baseball, but also, watched some golf. The social problems of golf are just too much for me, but I loved watching the U.S. Open - So, slow, dreamy, and with a strange body kind of thinking.

Also, went to see the A's play the Mariners with my friend Scott Ralston. 0-0 until the 6th, A's get two home runs (one from Kurt Suzuki - it was his first at-bat, he was pinchhitting - just weird!) in the bottom of the 9th, and win on another homer in the bottom of the 11th.

Anyway, my point is, Scott and I started yawning in the 8th inning, before it got interesting. I love it. Boredom, not ennui, not decadence...just the pace of life kind of replicated. The long-ish view. A tired, heavy-lidded attention.

Can we talk about the politics of this stuff a bit? Lauren's up in Montana, Megan'll be here soon, so this post might sit for awhile.
-Jared

Rasula on the COMPOST

Right Here

"Various Gothic Lifestyle Events"

Dig, if you will:

http://www.uncannymedia.nl/index.php

We are, of course, not alone in our investigations, in the universe, in California. Please note "The Popular Uncanny" in our links...

I've written a new "Admiration" for Brenda Coultas, just mentioned as an exemplar of 'expanded empiricism - it says, in part:

What kind of land deserves a death-mask as much as John C. Reilly, in life a friendly ghost but with pangs of history written in a dark script around the eyes, jowls, brows? A ghostliest place name is Indianola wherever you find it like a sign, what cheer. Life before the internet.

-Jared

Issue #2 Update

Lest we forget that this is a blog about a poetry magazine, here's an update about Issue #2:

Mrs. Maybe #2 will be out by September. Contributors include:

Alli Warren
Andrew Kenower
Bill Luoma
Brandon Shimoda
Catherine Meng
Christopher DeWeese
Claire Becker
Cynthia Sailers
Daniel Ostmann
Dorothea Lasky
Elisabeth Beasley
Genevieve Kaplan
Jessica Baron
Joseph Massey
Logan Ryan Smith
Nathan Hoks

And more.

Thanks to all who submitted poems, and also to all who responded to our entreaties to submit.
This is going to be a big, good, issue.


-Jared

Two of the Austere, for Context

Once again, proving that K. Goldsmith is not in control of linear time, two artists who came after (well, one did, anyway) Pop:

“Time turns metaphors into things, and stacks them up in cold rooms, or places them in the celestial playgrounds of the suburbs.”

-Robert Smithson (on Patina)

“When I first made a grid, I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then a grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I thought, This is my vision.”

-Agnes Martin

Frightening idea, that.